Page 85 of Wild Catch
And most of all, so thatshedoesn’t notice that I want all of her smiles to myself even though I don’t deserve them—don’t deserve her.
CHAPTER29
ROSE
“What are your thoughts about the newest addition to the Orlando Wild roster?” I ask Cade, angling the camera at his face. About half of the team is running drills across the green in the background.
“It’s really exciting,” he says with that Texas twang that makes the vowels sound rounder somehow. “The fact is that our team was already strong enough to pike the interest of the league’s MVP. Now having him on board makes us a powerhouse.”
My shoulders shrink, trying to contain the giddy energy that threatens to come out. Cade starts struggling with holding back a smile—I don’t know if because he’s also as pumped or if it’s because I’m contagious—and I pause the recording to let out a squeal.
“Oh my gosh, Cade!” I make a series of little jumps. “This is huge!Huge, I’m telling you!”
He laughs and removes his hat to comb his brown hair back. “It really is, I still can’t quite believe it myself.”
“Are you all done?” Lucky asks from behind me. “It’s my turn to be charming in front of the camera.”
“Admit it, you have no interest in talking about Machado. You just want to grow your own social media followers,” Cade tosses back.
“Obviously.” Lucky snorts. “I’m two thousand away from a million on Instagram. I just need a little push.”
“Just one million?” While he steps aside, Cade blows a raspberry in open mockery. “Talk to me when you have a million and a half, son.”
“Son?” Lucky’s outrage makes me laugh. “May I remind you that you’re three years younger than me, you literal child?”
“You guys are ridiculous. Normal people like me barely have two thousand followers,” I explain amid chuckles.
“That is only because you set your profile to private after you started dating Logan.” Lucky points at me with narrowed eyes. “If you make it public you’ll easily reach half a mill in a matter of days.”
And that’s precisely why I don’t, because I’m not really Logan’s girlfriend.
If that comes to light, or when we have our official breakup, I’m going to get tons of hate from his overeager fans. It’ll make handling the team socials a pain in the bootie, and I’d rather not have to deal with all that on my own profiles.
Then again, with any luck I’ll already be set to replace our retiring team broadcaster by that point.
I clear my throat. “How do you know I set it to private?”
“Because I tried to follow you and you completely ignored me.”
His bestie pokes the wound even more by asking, “Why weren’t you following her before, then?”
“What do you want me to do? Build a time machine and go back in time to follow my teammate’s girlfriend on social media?”
“So, Lucky,” I call his attention away from the silly argument. “Give me your take for our followers. If you make it really juicy, it might earn you those two-kay followers you want. Let’s go.”
“Listen, princesa…” I can tell by the mischievous glint in his eye that he’s going to do a Lucky-thing next. Sure enough, he untucks his T-shirt and begins lifting it. “What’s really juicy here is?—”
“Are you going to keep fooling around or practice?”
We all freeze at the sinister voice approaching from behind me.
The first one to recover is Lucky, and that glint hasn’t vanished from his eyes as he turns them to me. “Oh, no. Looks like the big bad boyfriend is jealous.”
My lips curve into a wane smile. So many falsehoods in that sentence, the main one being that Logan is bad.
When he catches up, I say, “They’re not fooling around. I’m capturing interviews about the big news.”
But if he hears me, Logan pretends not to. He grabs the back of Lucky’s T-shirt with one hand, and does the same to Cade with the other one. “Let’s go, clowns.”
